krystal dragon

My knitting friends and I have been experimenting with food dyes and yarn… Kool-Aid, the little drop-shaped bottles of food colouring, the fancy-schmancy gel/paste colours for icing, and even Easter egg dye tablets.  So much fun… I will put up some yarn pics eventually, but for now, I’m working on a test knit for one of the group.  She is experimenting with using words in her dye patterns, and asked me to knit up her first sample piece.  She dyed a sock blank with the word ‘DREAM’, knowing of course that the words won’t appear on the socks – the point here is the intent behind the design.  She gave me free reign on design, so I picked the Thuja sock pattern from Knitty – a nice seeded rib with an increased stitch count to accommodate the finer weight yarn.  I’ve knitted through the semi-solid end of the blank, and you can see from the tiny specks of purple on the socks that I have reached the text:

I’ve also cast on the lovely Spectra by Stephen West.  This scarf reminds me of the song ‘Rainbow Connection‘ from the Muppet Movie.  Colour sings to my soul, just like Kermit the Frog sitting on his log in the swamp.  This is happy, knitted into a scarf.  This is also my first experience with intarsia… that was slightly less happy, but things became much simpler when I quit trying to follow the directions about crossing the two yarns and just did it the way I learned at my LYS (old yarn goes left, new yarn comes up over it, carry on this way for EVERY switch).  Much easier.  I think I’m about 20% of the way through right now, give or take a wedge.  I intend to knit until the coloured yarn runs out, since I can always get more of the black border stuff.

And oh, it’s pretty.  Laa-da-da-deee-da-da-dooo…

See that?  It’s a finished blanket.  It only took a little discipline.  Too bad I have very little!  But here it is… now just have to get it to the baby!

I woke up yesterday and thought I had been transported to London overnight.

Gorgeous, yes?

While the weather here has been unseasonably warm (hitting 80 degrees in WINTER?!?), I’ve still been churning away on a few fibre-related projects.  I learned to spin on a drop spindle:

That’s a beautiful Turkish spindle from Jenkins Woodworking, and some unspecified roving from my LYS.  I’m now spinning my way through some squishy alpaca that I purchased at the Indiana State Fair.  It’s cotton candy colours, which I found appropriate for roving from a state fair.  Pre-drafting is my friend.

I also finished my Pleiades scarf.  The yarn is sadly discontinued – Kitchen Sink Dyeworks Silver Spoon, colourway Edgar.

I knew I was flirting with danger when I started this project… it calls for 450 yards of DIC Starry, but I was using a 410-yard skein of  Silver Spoon (did I mention it’s discontinued?  REALLY thumbing my nose at the knitting gods with this project).  I blithely cast on anyway, and knitted merrily through the leafy strip and crescent section.  I hit the ribbing for the border, and started to worry just a smidge.  I began compulsively weighing the remaining ball after every row, and calculated that I should just be able to squeak through the rows outlined in the pattern.  I knitted my last row, then started the cast-off, ignoring the rapidly shrinking ball rolling around in the bottom of my yarn bowl.  Halfway through the cast-off, I unrolled the dwindling ball and stretched the remaining yarn across the un-bound stitches.  I had four times that width, so I gave myself a mental pat on the back and kept on going.  After another quarter of the cast-off, I repeated the stretching process… uh-oh.  Now I only had double the width.  I was using up yarn far faster than my supply would allow.  Bollocks.

I sat on the sofa and cursed for a few minutes, then proceeded to unpick about 430 bound-off stitches, tink a row of 574 more stitches, and finally cast off those 574 stitches for once and for all.  I love it, and am wallowing in the fact that the next few days are forecast closer to seasonal norms for early Spring (around the 50s).    Now, I’m finishing up that sorely overdue baby blanket (remember the granny squares?)  I’m not allowed to cast on anything new until it’s done – smack my fingers if I get too close to the ball winder, will you?

It’s taken me a while to be able to write this.

Last month, my grandmother passed away unexpectedly.

She was an incredible woman who lived life on exactly her terms.  She always referred to your posterior as your fanny, was active in her church, put me on her prayer list for being Pagan but loved me anyway, made us kids eat things we didn’t like but were good for us and then gave us homemade applesauce (with red hots) afterwards, kept a Grandparent’s Day card my siblings and I gave her twenty years ago, made play-dough from scratch, once washed my mouth out with Ivory soap (tastes terrible), and taught me to crochet when I was just four or five.

It’s been more than a month, and I still don’t think I’ve really dealt with this.

In the short term, my coping mechanism has been to keep busy.  After all, it’s pretty hard to weep while you’re counting stitches.  Grandma’s favourite flower (and coincidentally March’s flower) was the daffodil.  When we weren’t able to get daffodils for her memorial service, I decided to make some using the skills she shared with me almost thirty years ago.  I wore these to the memorial in thanks to my grandmother, Leslie Jane, for all that she taught me.  I’ll miss you, Grandma.

You may recall my first Steampunk dragon, Oliver.  At that time, I mentioned Oliver’s friend was tuckered after his long flight.  As you can see, he basically crash-landed on my craft table.  Algernon somehow bears a striking resemblance to the fridge-eating mutt I had a few years ago.  Hopefully, he doesn’t have a similar fondness for dining on my appliances.

Algernon’s actually a bit too big for a pendant, but he’s fun regardless.  One wing is part of an old automobile clock, and the other wing is the impression of that clock part in clay to create a mirrored pair of wings.  He has proper Steampunk goggles and well-loved flying gloves (I have an opportunity to improve my hand-sculpting abilities, but these aren’t too dreadful).  The goggle construction came from the Steampunkery book I’ve referenced before.

This pair’s for you, Kourtney!  Sorry they’re late.

Anyone else I owe something to, I’ll keep working on the backlog. 

The yarn is the splendidly self-striping Vesper Sock, by Knitterly Things.  I shouldn’t tell you that, because her shop updates already sell out almost instantly, and you might beat me to it next time.  Forget I said anything.  These are not the socks you’re looking for.

I kept a tight rein on my crafty impulses over the holidays this year, restricting the number of gifts I would make.  I normally end up in a puddle of crazy on December 24th, scrambling to finish a hat, or fingerless mitts, or a scarf.  Many a project has been given in kit form, though I do my darnedest to finish those by the end of January!  This year, a non-yarny project lodged in the back of my mind, and wouldn’t budge.  I sternly told this impulse to buzz off, since work has been taking up the vast majority of my recent time, but this idea just wouldn’t give up.  I finally bowed to the designy urges, and bought the necessary supplies to craft some placemats for my grandparents.  They’re primarily wool-blend felt, trimmed with homespun and a few charming buttons.  Like the snowflake appliques that adorn these, no two are alike!  I’m pleased to report that they matched the kitchen perfectly, and that Grandma loves them.  Now to work on the matching napkin rings!

With the holidays in mind, please enjoy the following guide on how to make peppermint bark (in five easy steps).

1: Purchase your ingredients. You need white chocolate and hard peppermints. I’m partial to the Wilton Candy Melts myself, as they melt beautifully. Get two bags for the two batches we’re planning to make – one for work and one for the family. Remember that we also want to make cake pops later in the week, and buy two bags for that. Nab some Starlight Mints, as well. Big bags are on sale? Score! Grab two, for those two batches. Head home for some melty fun.

2: Prepare the mints. Put on Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the original animated one with Boris Karloff, not the Jim Carrey remake). Settle in to watch and unwrap those mints. Split them into four Ziplocks to keep them managable for crushing. Seal ‘em up, wrap ‘em in a towel, and beat the tar out of ‘em with a hammer. Take out your stress. That guy who cut you off on the interstate? That mint is his car window. Pow! Aim for pieces no bigger than a quarter inch (you also get some nice minty dust). All done? Feel better? Good, go get those melts ready.

3: Melt the white chocolate. Pour one bag of melts into a microwave-safe bowl. Half-power in the microwave for a minute, stir, give it another thirty seconds, stir, repeat. Never, ever, ever try to melt this all in one go – you need those breaks to keep the heat even and avoid scorching. When it’s almost smooth, quit zapping, and just stir to melt the remaining bits. Trust me, it’ll work.

4: Mix it up. Grab one of your bags of crushed mints, and dump it on in the bowl of melty chocolate. Stir, stir, stir, then reach for the next bag of mint. After all, we’re making two batches, right? And we have four bags of crushed mints? Hm, that mixed up goo in the bowl looks suspiciously right… crud, we bought big bags of mints. Allow ten seconds for brief, heartfelt cursing (bonus points if you use a language other than your native tongue). Acknowledge that you’re going to need all four bags of melts, and that you’ll have to get more for the cake pops later. Get that stuff out of the bowl before it sets.

5: Finish it. Pour the melty goo out onto a sheet of foil, and smooth as best you can into a layer about a quarter inch thick. Resist the urge to lick the spoon, because we have three more rounds of this. Lick the spoon anyway, wash it now that it’s contaminated, and toss the next batch of melts in the microwave. Consider buying pretty treat bags and gifting peppermint bark to all of your friends.

Happy Holidays!

It’s been almost a month since my last blog post.  Think that baby blanket’s done?

Guess again.

In other news, I bought a spiffy new camera.  This is one of the first pics!

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”  Douglas Adams

If you read my last post, you know I had started a baby blanket, which was vexed by catastrophic gauge issues.  I scrapped that mess, since I didn’t want to stitch such angry vibes into a baby gift, and I started the same basic design over in nice, controllable granny squares.  Can’t mess up gauge that much in such a small block, to my way of thinking.  Since then, a very nice thing and a very not-nice thing have happened.  Nice thing:  the baby was born!  Beautiful little Kelsie, whose mother put in the order for her baby blanket as soon as she announced Kelsie’s impending arrival.  Not-nice thing:  I developed a lousy case of bronchitis, had to cancel a trip that would have provided a few good solid hours of road stitching time, and haven’t still finished the blanket.  In all fairness to me, Kelsie’s a mite early (a week or two, I think), and I’m utterly certain that I could have caught up in time.  However, the fact remains that my cousin has produced a baby, and I have not as of yet produced a blanket.  I have a sneaking suspicion that I will be denied baby visitation until said blanket is produced.  I also suspect that the bronchitis might extend that window a bit, since I can’t get near the munchkin while this sick.  63 squares down, won’t think about how many more to go (the last blanket was around 160-ish…)